animal calendar

It's been a busy-calendar week, with Erik's and my various Google calendars filled to the brim with things we'd do anyways (like "eat dinner") and things we'll forget to do even when we double up on reminders ("yard waste pickup" every other week).

I finally took the plunge and started two weeks of swim lessons, each weekday after work. My usual running, bike rides, errands, gardening, and other hobbies have fallen by the wayside. It's a rush to get home from work, get ready for class, swim, and get home just before 8pm, starving. After dinner, we rush off to see visiting friends and relatives, to a show, to various appointments.

On one of my afternoon walks at work, searching for the various fauna that make the campus so fascinating and alive, I realized that animals are the pattern I see everywhere. Looking up at clouds and identifying the shapes; staring at tessellations and making sense of fabric patterns; recognizing faces to go with names-- I see non-human animals. The human brain is mapped to distinguish human faces, to extrapolate emotions and thus possible actions through facial expression. Why, then, do I see geese, whales, snails, and foxes? Is it backwards, wrong, or possibly deeper and more useful? Certainly it's a useful skill to be able to recognize familiar people in different contexts, and I wonder what it means-- besides being considered unfriendly-- that I don't have it.